CNN contributor and former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum argued on Sunday that President Donald Trump’s speech in Saudi Arabia was so moderate that courts in the United States would have to drop objections to his Muslim ban.

“To judges in this country who are looking at his immigration ban, it’s going to be very hard to say, ‘This is a Muslim hater, he hates Islam, you know, he wants to ban Muslims,’” Santorum explained to CNN’s Jake Tapper. “All the [government] solititor has to do is play parts of that speech and you’ve now deflected that.”

Or it could be that being around a lot of people you’ve spent the better part of ten plus years demonizing would be highly uncomfortable.

But ironically, it looks like Mike Pence engenders discomfort wherever he is.

This morning was the graduation ceremony for Notre Dame University near South Bend, Indiana. The event’s keynote speaker was the former governor of Indiana and current vice president. And several graduates felt that whatever message Pence wanted to give to these students as they head out to the real world wasn’t worth hearing.

As soon as Pence approached the podium, a graduate in the front row stood up and turned her back to the vice president. Other graduates soon stood as well but silently filed out of the arena, an estimated 150 students and family members. It turns out they presciently had followed the advice of his speech before he even gave it, urging students to be “to be men and women of integrity and values.”

During a CNN appearance on Sunday, CBS News contributor Bob Schieffer asserted that President Donald Trump “actually sounded presidential” because he did not go off script during his speech to Muslim leaders in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

“Today, you saw a very different President Trump,” Schieffer said following the speech. “He actually sounded presidential. You may agree or disagree with what he said, but he sounded like a president. He laid out his vision. He called for help for those in the Muslim world. He was a much different kind of presentation.”

“This went over very well. Mainly because he stayed on script,” he added. “No tweets today, but a dignified speech.”

Schieffer went on to suggest that Trump “helped himself today” with regard to the investigation into Russia’s hacking of the U.S. election.

“He didn’t sound like the guy at the end of the bar popping off,” Schieffer explained. “He sounded like someone who actually thought about what he was going to say before he said it,” ignoring the fact that the speech was written in advance by adviser Stephen Miller (though uncharacteristically much less offensive than his usual anti-Muslim rhetoric) and fed into the teleprompter.

CNN host John Berman noted that Schieffer’s comments could be viewed as “normalizing the president.”

“You’re saying that because he met this very low bar for not sounding foolish, he was in fact presidential,” Berman said.

House Oversight Committee Chairmain Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) responded to questions about President Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia on Sunday by asserting that people who leak information about the president should be investigated and jailed.

This Week host George Stephanopoulos noted during an interview with Chaffetz that a senior official in the White House was reportedly a person of interest in the investigation into Russia interference in the U.S. election.

“I want to see that this person is prosecuted,” the outgoing Utah Republican insisted. “I think the president makes a very good point. No matter who’s in the White House, you cannot have the type of leaking of information, sources, methods, classified information. I don’t care who it is, Democrat or Republican, you cannot have that happen.”

“Not only do you need to wall them off, you probably need to put some handcuffs on them and put them in jail,” he added.

“That’s for leakers,” Stephanopoulos observed. “That’s different from the person of interest in this investigation, isn’t it?”

Fox would like to help Trump make this entire Russiagate story go away altogether, but they can’t. In the meantime, they’re going to run as much interference for Trump as humanly possible.

As we’ve already discussed here, for the last few weeks, they’ve been really busyattacking the press for their negative coverage for Trump, and for heaven forbid, doing their jobs and acting like journalists and following the leads where they take them.

The next step in distracting their viewers over the mounting evidence of obstruction of justice, requires going after Comey and the special counsel, Robert Mueller. We got our first signs of that this Sunday on Howard Kurtz’s show, Media Buzz, where he wondered aloud whether the media should be questioning Comey’s “motivation” after a number of his friends and former colleagues spoke to the press about the fact that Comey kept very detailed memos of his meetings with Trump.

To date, no other media outlet has confirmed this news. And Priebus was visible during Trump’s speech this morning in Saudi Arabia, so clearly he didn’t hightail it out of there after the rather horrifying view of Trump, Tillerson and Ross dancing with swords.

Even before David Clarke claimed to have taken a job with Trump’s Department of Homeland Security - which still has not been confirmed by Trump or the agency - I always thought that Clarke would be a good fit for Trump’s team.

Like Trump and most of his appointees, Clarke has all of the same qualities. Clarke doesn’t know his job - Clarke, the sheriff, tried to help a drunk driver instead of arresting him. Then like a true Trumpkin, Clarke tried to cover up his failure.

The Fox News program Justice with Judge Jeanine on Saturday abruptly cut video of President Donald Trump bowing his head to King Salman of Saudi Arabia.

During an interview with Trump Counselor Kellyanne Conway, Fox News host Jeanine Pirro’s show played B-roll of Trump’s lavish visit to Saudi Arabia.

But when the highly-mocked video of Trump bowing to accept a gift from the Saudi King appeared on the screen, Pirro appeared to motion with her hand and the video was cut short. The broadcast briefly switched to a full screen shot of Conway before before resuming to the B-roll footage after Trump’s bow.

For many Americans, Russian hacking remains a story about the 2016 election. But there is another story taking shape. Marrying a hundred years of expertise in influence operations to the new world of social media, Russia may finally have gained the ability it long sought but never fully achieved in the Cold War: to alter the course of events in the U.S. by manipulating public opinion. The vast openness and anonymity of social media has cleared a dangerous new route for antidemocratic forces. “Using these technologies, it is possible to undermine democratic government, and it’s becoming easier every day,” says Rand Waltzman of the Rand Corp., who ran a major Pentagon research program to understand the propaganda threats posed by social media technology.

Current and former officials at the FBI, at the CIA and in Congress now believe the 2016 Russian operation was just the most visible battle in an ongoing information war against global democracy. And they’ve become more vocal about their concern. “If there has ever been a clarion call for vigilance and action against a threat to the very foundation of our democratic political system, this episode is it,” former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified before Congress on May 8.